William Wilberforce: The Life of the Great Anti-Slave Trade Campaigner

One day, when all our people were gone out to their work as usual, and only I and my dear sister were left to mind the house, two men and a woman got over our walls, and in a moment seized us both; and without giving us time to cry out, or make resistance, they stopped our mouths, and ran off with us to the nearest wood. Here they tied our hands, and continued to carry us as far as they could, till night came on, when we reached a small house, where the robbers halted for refreshment and spent the night … The next morning we left the house, and continued travelling all the day. For a long time we had kept to the woods, but at last we came into a road which I believed I knew. I had now some hopes of being delivered; for we had advanced but a little way before I discovered some people at a distance, on which I began to cry out for their assistance: but my cries had no other effect than to make them tie me faster and stop my mouth; they then put me into a large sack. They also stopped my sister’s mouth, and tied her hands; and in this manner we proceeded till we were out of the sight of those people … The next day proved a day of greater sorrow than I had yet experienced; for my sister and I were then separated, while we lay clasped in each other’s arms. It was in vain that we besought them not to part us; she was torn from me, and immediately carried away, while I was left in a state of distraction not to be described.13

Such kidnapping was common. A nineteenth-century study of the origins of subsequently freed slaves suggested that 30 per cent of them had been kidnapped (by other Africans), while 11 per cent had been sold after being condemned by a judicial process (for adultery, for example), 7 per cent had been sold to pay debts and a further 7 per cent had been sold by relations or friends.14 The largest proportion of all, 34 per cent, had been taken in war, but John Newton was probably being too sanguine when he argued that ‘I verily believe, that the far greater part of the wars, in Africa, would cease, if the Europeans would cease to tempt them, by offering goods for slaves.’15 African kingdoms fought wars against each other and enslaved each other’s people long before the Europeans arrived to make matters worse, but there seems little doubt that the lure of the slave trade sometimes contributed to the outbreak of conflict. One observer of the time wrote: ‘The wars which the inhabitants of the interior part of the country … carry on with each other are chiefly of a predatory nature, and owe their origin to the yearly number of slaves which [they] … suppose will be wanted by the vessels which arrive on the coast.’16 On the other hand, a Royal Navy captain, John Matthews, argued that ‘the nations which inhabit the interior parts of Africa … profess the Mahometan religion; and, following the means prescribed by their prophet, are perpetually at war with the surrounding nations who refuse to embrace their religious doctrines … The prisoners made in these religious wars furnish a great part of the slaves which are sold to the Europeans; and would … be put to death if they had not the means of disposing of them.’17 At minimum, the feeding of the slave trade became a way of life for tens of thousands of Africans and a source of power and wealth for trading networks which stretched deep into the interior of the continent, such as that of the Aro traders, and kingdoms which supplied huge numbers of slaves, such as the Lunda empire. It was the supplying of slaves which gave such people access to large quantities of copper, iron and, perhaps above all, guns. One cargo list of a ship setting out to purchase 250 slaves in 1733 included a certain amount of textile products, but showed that the vessel carried most of its estimated value in metals and arms, including four hundred ‘musquets’, forty pairs of ‘Common large Pistols’ and forty ‘blunderbuses’, along with fourteen tons of iron, one thousand copper rods and eighty bottles of brandy.18 Whatever benefit the African tribes derived from the sale of slaves, it was most unlikely to make them more peaceable.

Since most slaves originated far from the coast, perhaps hundreds of miles inland, the first part of their journey involved a long trek on foot, usually yoked together and underfed, with a consequently high rate of mortality. The original kidnappers might have received only a small fraction of the final price of the slave by the time they had paid tolls and duties in the course of a journey and sold on their captives to intermediary traders, at large fairs held specifically for that purpose. In the words of Alexander Falconbridge, a surgeon aboard slave ships who would later give evidence to Parliament:

The unhappy wretches thus disposed of are bought by the black traders at fairs, which are held for that purpose, at the distance of upwards of two hundred miles from the sea coast; and these fairs are said to be supplied from an interior part of the country. Many Negroes, upon being questioned relative to the places of their nativity, have asserted that they have travelled during the revolution of several moons (their usual method of calculating time) before they have reached the places where they were purchased by the black traders … From forty to two hundred Negroes are generally purchased at a time by the black traders, according to the opulence of the buyer, and consist of all ages, from a month to sixty years and upwards. Scarcely any age or situation is deemed an exception, the price being proportionable. Women sometimes form a part of them, who happen to be so far advanced in their pregnancy as to be delivered during their journey from the fairs to the coast; and I have frequently seen instances of deliveries on board ship.19

Despite the constant supply of slaves thus proceeding to the coast, such was the competition among European traders that they often had to anchor for many weeks while slowly filling their decks with slaves amidst much haggling. John Newton’s diary for the year 1750 gives some flavour of what was involved.

Wednesday 9th January … the traders came onboard with the owner of the slave; paid the excessive price of 86 bars which is near 12£ sterling, or must have let him gone on shoar again, which I was unwilling to do, as being the first that was brought on board the ship, and had I not bought him should have hardly seen another. But a fine man slave, now there are so many competitors, is near double the price it was formerly. There are such numbers of french vessels and most of them determined to give any price they are asked, rather than trade should fall into our hands, that it seems as if they are fitted out not so much for their own advantage, as with a view of ruining our purchases. This day buried a fine woman slave, number eleven, having been ailing sometime, but never thought her in danger till within these two days; she was taken with a lethargick disorder, which they seldom recover from …

Thursday 17th January … William Freeman came onboard with a woman girl slave. Having acquitted himself tolerably, entrusted him with goods for 2 more.Yellow Will sent me word had bought me a man, but wanted another musquet to compleat the bargain, which sent him.

Wednesday 23rd January … Yellow Will brought me off a boy slave, 3 foot 10 inches which I was obliged to take or get nothing. Fryday 25th January … Yellow Will brought me a woman slave, but being long breasted and ill-made refused her, and made him take her onshoar …20

Sometimes the traders resorted to simple trickery to fill their cargoes, as in this eyewitness account of Falconbridge:

A black trader invited a negroe, who resided a little way up the country, to come and see him. After the entertainment was over, the trader proposed to his guest, to treat him with a sight of one of the ships lying in the river. The unsuspicious countryman readily consented, and accompanied the trader in a canoe to the side of the ship, which he viewed with pleasure and astonishment. While he was thus employed, some black traders on board, who appeared to be in the secret, leaped into the canoe, seized the unfortunate man, and dragging him into the ship, immediately sold him.21

For most slaves, the moment of being taken on board a ship was one of utter terror. Very often they were convinced they were to be eaten – Equiano recalled that when he saw ‘a large furnace of copper boiling and a multitude of black people, of every description, chained together, every one of their countenances expressing dejection and sorrow, I no longer doubted of my fate’.22 Newton remembered how the women and girls were taken on board ‘naked, trembling terrified, perhaps almost exhausted with cold, fatigue and hunger’, only to be exposed to ‘the wanton rudeness of White savages’. Before long they would be raped: ‘The prey is divided upon the spot, and only reserved till opportunity offers.’23 It was said that a slave ship was usually ‘part bedlam and part brothel’. Newton recorded that while he was on shore one afternoon one of his crew ‘seduced a women slave down into the room and lay with her brute like in view of the whole quarterdeck, for which I put him in irons. If anything happens to the woman I shall impute it to him, for she was big with child. Her number is 83.’24 Not surprisingly, it was at this point that many slaves made desperate attempts to escape or to kill themselves, something which their captors were unable to comprehend. As another British captain recorded:

the men were all put in irons, two and two shackled together, to prevent their mutiny or swimming ashore. The Negroes are so wilful and loth to leave their own country, that they have often leap’d out of canoes, boat and ship into the sea, and kept under water until they were drowned to avoid being taken up and saved … they having a more dreadful apprehension of Barbados than we have of hell though, in reality they live much better there than in their own country; but home is home.25

If the slaves did indeed have a premonition of hell, then they were not far wide of the mark, for, unbelievably, the worst part of their ordeal was yet to come. The economics of the slave trade required the maximum number of slaves to be carried in the smallest possible space, with the result that they were forced into a hold, usually shackled together and often without space to turn round, in which some of their number would have already resided for several weeks. Equiano recalled that:

the stench of the hold, while we were on the coast, was so intolerably loathsome, that it was dangerous to remain there for any time … now that the whole ship’s cargo were confined together, it became absolutely pestilential. The closeness of the place, and the heat of the climate, added to the number of the ship, being so crowded that each had scarcely room to turn himself, almost suffocated us. This produced copious perspirations, so that the air soon became unfit for respiration, from a variety of loathsome smells, and brought on a sickness among the slaves, of which many died … The shrieks of the women, and the groans of the dying, rendered it a scene of horror almost inconceivable.26

Of course, it was in the interests of slave traders to keep their slaves in some degree of health, and during the day they would be taken up above decks and encouraged to ‘dance’, which generally meant jumping up and down with the encouragement of a whip. But in rough weather they would be confined below decks, with the portholes closed, in a scene of sometimes unimaginable horror. Falconbridge explained that the movement of the ship would cause the wooden planks to rub the skin off shoulders, elbows and hips, ‘so as to render the bones in those parts quite bare’.27 The result was that they not only suffered from excessive heat and the rapid spread of fevers, but that ‘the deck, that is the floor of their rooms, was so covered with the blood and mucus which had proceeded from them in consequence of the flux, that it resembled a slaughter-house. It is not in the power of the human imagination, to picture a situation to itself more dreadful or disgusting.’28

At this stage only the Portuguese had made any effort to regulate the conditions in which slaves could be carried. Amidst the terrible overcrowding and putrid stenches of the slave ships, an average of around one in ten of all the slaves carried on the ‘middle passage’ across the Atlantic during the eighteenth century died before reaching the Americas, but on ships which were hit by bad weather or severe fevers the death toll was far higher. The journey across the ocean normally took at least five weeks, but it could take many months, with disastrous consequences: the captain of one French ship which lost 496 of its 594 slaves in 1717 blamed his appalling rate of loss on the ‘length of the voyage’ as well as ‘the badness of the weather’.29 It is not surprising that many of those confined in these circumstances lost the will to live: ‘Some throw themselves into the sea, others hit their heads against the ship, others hold their breath to try and smother themselves, others still try to die of hunger from not eating …’30 Consequently, force-feeding was added to the list of brutal treatments. Falconbridge reported that ‘upon the negroes refusing to take sustenance, I have seen coals of fire, glowing hot put on a shovel and placed near to their lips, as to scorch and burn them. And this has been accompanied with threats of forcing them to swallow the coals, if they any longer persisted in refusing to eat.’31 While there were certainly slaving captains who tried to be humane, others behaved brutally and lost their temper with the slaves in their charge, as in this eyewitness account of a ship’s captain trying to force a child of less than a year old to eat:

the last time he took the child up and flogged it, and let it drop out of his hands, ‘Damn you (says he) I will make you eat, or I will be death of you;’ and in three quarters of an hour after that the child died. He would not suffer any of the people that were on the quarterdeck to heave the child overboard, but he called the mother of the child to heave it overboard. She was not willing to do so, and I think he flogged her; but I am sure that he beat her in some way for refusing to throw the child overboard; at last he made her take the child up, and she took it in her hand and went to the ship’s side, holding her head on one side, because she would not see the child go out of her hand and she dropped the child overboard. She seemed to be very sorry, and cried for several hours.32

There were many instances of the slaves fighting back and rising against their captors if the opportunity arose, particularly if they were still within sight of Africa. On rare occasions such mutinies were successful, and led to the murder of the entire crew; more usually they were brutally put down and the ringleaders treated with pitiless harshness. Newton recalled seeing rebellious slaves ‘sentenced to unmerciful whippings, continued till the poor creatures have not had power to groan under their misery’, and others ‘agonising for hours, I believe for days together, under the torture of the thumbscrews’.33

Those who survived the grotesque horrors of the middle passage were by no means at the end of their torment. They still had to experience the process of being sold in the markets of Jamaica, Barbados or Rio de Janeiro. A visitor to Rio described how ‘There are Shops full of these Wretches, who are exposed there stark naked, and bought like Cattle.’34 Others were sold by ‘scramble’, with several hundred of them placed in a yard together and available at an equal price to whoever could get to them first when the gates were opened. Falconbridge noted: ‘It is scarcely possible to describe the confusion of which this mode of selling is productive,’35 and Equiano, who was himself sold by this method in Barbados, recalled that ‘the noise and clamour with which this is attended, and the eagerness visible in the countenances of the buyers serve not a little to increase the apprehensions of the terrified Africans … In this manner, without scruple, are relations and friends separated, most of them never to see one another again.’36

This was the Atlantic slave trade: brutal, mercenary and inhumane from its beginning to its end. Yet in British politics the assumption had always been that its abolition was inconceivable. Even Edmund Burke, as he thundered out his denunciations of colonial misrule in India and called for the radical reform of the British state, concluded in 1780 that a rough plan for the immediate mitigation and ultimate suppression of the trade could not succeed, as the West Indian lobby would prove too powerful in Parliament. Three years earlier, another MP, Thomas Temple Luttrell, had given voice to the received wisdom of the times when he said, ‘Some gentleman may … object to the slave trade as inhuman and impious; let us consider that, if our colonies are to be maintained and cultivated, which can only be done by African Negroes, it is surely better to supply ourselves … in British bottoms.’37 This, until the mid-178os, was the general and settled presumption. But no MP of that time could fully perceive the power of the new ideas that were beginning to take hold in many minds, or that those ideas would shortly become the inspiration of some remarkable and brilliant individuals.

Even while the slaves were being forced into ships on the African coast in record numbers in the second half of the eighteenth century, a major shift was taking place in moral and political philosophy which would open the door to the slave trade being questioned and attacked. For the eighteenth century saw the arrival of what has subsequently been termed the ‘Age of Enlightenment’: a rapid growth in human knowledge and capabilities, accompanied by new beliefs concerning the relationship of individuals to the state and to each other, coming together to create a sense of progress and modernity which in turn allowed traditional views and hierarchies to be challenged. The scientific and mathematical revolution precipitated by Sir Isaac Newton earlier in the century gave huge momentum to the development of new thinking based on rational deductions and ‘natural law’. Soon, political philosophers would be arguing for a rational new basis to the understanding of ethics, aesthetics and knowledge, setting out the concept of a free individual, denouncing the alleged superstition and tyranny of medieval times, and paving the way for modern notions of liberalism, freedom and democracy. This gathering change in philosophical outlook came alongside a quickening pace of economic and social change: the dawn of the Industrial Revolution saw the arrival of new manufacturing techniques, such as the ‘spinning jenny’, which revolutionised the production of cotton goods in Britain from the 1760s onwards, and allowed newly prosperous merchants and industrialists to compete with the aristocracy for political power; a rapid growth in population in urban settings, comprising people who were less willing than their rural predecessors to accept old notions of class and authority; a huge expansion in the availability of newspapers and pamphlets, which allowed political ideas to be communicated to a vastly greater number of people than ever before; and a maturing of imperial possessions and conquests which brought greater debate about the appropriate treatment of native peoples who had become colonial subjects.

It was changes such as these that would release intellectual movements which would underpin some of the epoch-changing events of the late eighteenth century, including the French and American Revolutions and the independence movement in Latin America; but an important offshoot of Enlightenment thinking was the belief that in a rational world, institutionalised slavery could not be defended. In his celebrated L’Esprit des lois, published in 1748, Montesquieu brilliantly summed up what would become the Enlightenment case against slavery:

Slavery in its proper sense is the establishment of a right which makes one man so much the owner of another man that he is the absolute master of his life and of his goods. It is not good by its nature; it is useful neither to the master nor to the slave: not to the slave, because he can do nothing from virtue; not to the master, because he contracts all sorts of bad habits from his slaves, because he imperceptibly grows accustomed to failing in all the moral virtues, because he grows proud, curt, harsh, angry, voluptuous, and cruel.38

It was not long before other French thinkers, whose work would be fundamental to the upheavals of the subsequent Revolution, would go further, with Rousseau arguing in 1762 in Le Contrat social that men were born with the right to be free and equal, and that ‘The words slave and right contradict each other, and are mutually exclusive.’39 It was not only the view of radical and revolutionary writers that slavery stood condemned. The Scottish philosopher Adam Ferguson argued in 1769 that ‘No one is born a slave; because everyone is born with all his original rights … no one can become a slave; because no one, from being a person, can … become a thing or subject of property.’40 He was following in the tradition of a previous professor of philosophy in Scotland, the Irishman Francis Hutcheson (1694–1746), who had argued in A System of Moral Philosophy that ‘All men … have strong desires of liberty and property,’ and that ‘No damage done or crime committed can change a rational creature into a piece of goods void of all right.’41 Yet another Glaswegian professor who would subsequently add massively to the intellectual case against slavery was Adam Smith, whose words carried all the more significance because they were part of his general justification for capitalism and market economics. He argued that slavery was inefficient economically because it was an artificial constraint on individuals acting in their own self-interest, and was thus an obstruction to maximum economic efficiency. In The Wealth of Nations (1776) he argued that

the experience of all ages and nations, I believe, demonstrates that the work done by slaves, though it appears to cost only their maintenance, is in the end the dearest of any. A person who can acquire no property, can have no other interest but to eat as much, and to labour as little as possible. Whatever work he does beyond what is sufficient to purchase his own maintenance can be squeezed out of him by violence only and not be any interest of his own.42

Other hugely influential British writers followed in Smith’s wake, with William Paley mocking slavery in Moral Philosophy (1785), which was widely circulated as a textbook:

But necessity is pretended; the name under which every enormity is attempted to be justified. And after all, what is the necessity? It has never been proved that the land could not be cultivated there, as it is here, by hired servants. It is said, that it could not be cultivated with quite the same conveniency and cheapness, as by the labour of slaves; by which means, a pound of sugar, which the planter now sells for sixpence could not be afforded under sixpence halfpenny; – and this is the necessity!43

The views of such figures as Smith and Paley are of huge significance since they meant, in more modern terms, that the intellectual attack on slavery came from the right as well as the left; it was not necessary to believe in an entirely new social order or in inalienable rights of man in order to accept that slavery could not be economically justified or pragmatically accepted. For young, conservative-minded British politicians such as Pitt and Wilberforce, the works of Adam Smith and William Paley were high on their list of reading materials.

The changing intellectual climate of the late eighteenth century helped to awaken a Christian concern about slavery which had occasionally surfaced in earlier centuries, to little effect. Vatican rulings against the keeping of slaves in the seventeenth century had been understood to refer to natives of the Americas rather than to African Negroes, and the call for ‘an end to slavery’ by Pope Clement XI early in the eighteenth century was greeted with total indifference in Lisbon and Madrid. Yet while established Churches, whether in Rome or Canterbury, were too politically constrained and philosophically complacent to mount a serious challenge to such a widely accepted institution as slavery, the subject was a natural one for Christians of a more reforming or Evangelical disposition. As early as 1671 George Fox, the founder of the Quakers, had called on slave-owners not to use cruelty towards Negroes, and ‘that after certain years of servitude they should set them free’.44 By the late eighteenth century, as the scale and growth of slavery became more widely acknowledged and the moral climate of the times moved against it, it became a natural target for Evangelicals and Methodists. Moreover, their beliefs in applying Christian principles to the whole of life, in the importance of Providence and their accountability to God, gave many of them a sense of unavoidable responsibility to combat slavery, rather than a choice of whether or not to do so. By 1774 John Wesley was railing against the slave trade and all who took part in it, threatening slave traders with a worse fate than Sodom and Gomorrah and reminding them that ‘He shall have Judgment without mercy that hath showed no mercy.’ He told plantation-owners that ‘Men-buyers are exactly on a level with Men-stealers,’ and merchants that their money was being used ‘to steal, rob, murder men, women and children without number’; ‘Liberty is the right of every human creature, as soon as he breathes the vital air. And no human law can deprive him of that right, which he derives from the law of nature.’45 It was on the basis of such thinking that in due course British Evangelicals would eventually become an indispensable component of the campaign against the slave trade.